An anonymous reader writes: Last year, I registered for a car auction website, figuring that I may be able to save some money by getting lucky with a car auction. Unfortunately, it turned out that the site was a part of a network of hundreds of sites. Unsubscribing to their newsletters was easy enough, but I wanted to purge the account and delete it. That's when I discovered that there is absolutely nothing on their website that tells you how to do so. Worst yet, the reply-to email, "customerservice@auctionpipeline.com," bounced: "Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the server for the recipient domain." So I called their tech support number. Surprisingly, a live tech support person picked up within minutes, and I asked for my account to be deleted. The response went something like, "Uhm... we... don't... delete.. accounts..." With some insistence, he said he'll pass my email onto someone further up the chain of command for consideration and he'll get back to me in a few days. I'm not holding my breath. So now that every website has an option to sign up and join, but no obvious or established way to delete the account, what can be done if that service refuses to delete that account?Link to Original Source

totally_mad writes: New York Times reports that Google has acquired Boston Dynamics, a company that is primarily a concept robot maker for the military. The robot wars appear to be heating up between the big corporations, with Amazon recently announcing plans to have 30 minute home deliveries using drones. Perhaps Boston Dynamics', or now Google's, Cheetah will outrun the drone!Link to Original Source

There have been several other attempts in to setup similar wikis. For example, Scholarpedia is exactly this model of a peer-reviewed topical encyclopaedia, but for mathematical sciences. There were two comments from other Slashdotters, complaining that a group of academics, or any group of people will often struggle to reach consensus. But I think that there are qualitatively different types of disagreements. Some are about writing or presentation style ("where the place the word 'the'"). But, some are more substantive, especially in topics that are not entirely resolved. For example, there is little disagreement that Newton's laws are wrong, but nearly exact for certain spatial and time scales. But, if you were to write an article on information coding in neurons, there are probably as many opinions as there are labs working in that area!

If only Wikipedia became more widely used than it is presently, especially in academic circles, then more groups will be interested in having articles reflect debates. To reflect different opinions is particularly important in fields involving subjectivity (pretty much every thing other than Mathematics). If there is enough interest among academics in Wikipedia, then the current state of debates on various topics is bound to be reflected in the articles.

Given that Stanford's plato website is simply a fledgling effort, I do not see why it is newsworthy. If for example, someone cited an article from the plato website in a peer-reviewed journal article (and reviewers accepted it), that would be newsworthy. Short of that, it is simply yet another effort at collaborative information sharing. It cannot be newsworthy simply because it is from a well known university.

An anonymous reader writes: Quoting from the Technology Review article: "A new mathematical model of human throwing action suggests that current thinking about the biomechanical origin of error is wrong. Imagine you are throwing a ball into a bin. Are you better off using an overarm or an underarm throw? It turns out that this question has been surprisingly hard to get to grips with for physicists and biomechanicists alike. Today, however, Madhusudhan Venkadesan and Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan at Harvard University's Applied Math Lab, throw some additional light on the problem."

The paper on arXiv (http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.1442) also claims to have some new results about how to shoot a gun depending on how consistent the gun powder is at propelling the bullet!Link to Original Source

Posted
by
Soulskillon Monday August 23, 2010 @06:06PM
from the passing-out-hundreds-in-the-lunch-line dept.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from an Associated Press report on next month's opening of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Los Angeles:
"With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever. The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of 'Taj Mahal' schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities. ... At RFK, the features include fine art murals and a marble memorial depicting the complex's namesake, a manicured public park, and a state-of-the-art swimming pool. 'There's no more of the old, windowless cinderblock schools of the '70s where kids felt, "Oh, back to jail,"' said Joe Agron, editor-in-chief of American School & University, a school construction journal. 'Districts want a showpiece for the community, a really impressive environment for learning.' ... Critics note that nearly 3,000 teachers have been laid off over the past two years, the academic year and programs have been slashed, the district faces a $640 million shortfall and some schools persistently rank among the nation's lowest performing."

totally_mad writes: BBC reports (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10134655.stm) on research from UIUC (http://passat.crhc.illinois.edu/projects.html) that points to scaleable solutions for stochastic CPUs. Higher "performance" at the cost of accuracy at the hardware level. Is there indeed an optimal error-rate for maximizing FLOPS?Link to Original Source

FERIM1 writes: Anatomical atlas of the human body is an electronic book, which will provide you with the full composition of the
human body. It contains many color images of individual sections of body parts, many X-Rays and many of viewsof human body parts from various sides. Notify you of the composition of the body of the male sex, women, andalso the child's body. Very suitable for students of medicine, general medicine, and it may be used by students
of high schools.

Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Tuesday May 18, 2010 @01:00PM
from the can-you-see-me-now dept.

dward90 writes "Two online projects will scan and edit Facebook privacy settings for maximum protection: ReclaimPrivacy (reclaimprivacy.org) and SaveFace (untangle.com). The article says: 'Several new applications have launched this week that are designed to easily reset a Facebook member's privacy settings, following new changes from the company that make a sizable chunk of profile content public by default when it was once kept under lock and key.'"

You don't really understand. There is nothing they could have done to prevent the worm. The astronaut was installing Outlook which asked them to "close all software like antivirus and firewall which may interfere with the installation". The rest is history...